Maggy Van Eijk’s “How Not to Fall Apart: Lessons Learned on the Road from Self-Harm to Self-Care”: Possible relevance of Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects”

Maggy Van Eijk, who is now the BBC’s social media editor, has a history of severe anxiety, and her arms are scarred from self-cutting and burning herself with cigarettes.

Van Eijk’s explanation of self-harm is that “it’s about anger that ‘refuses to leave my body’ if she’s upset or about the feeling that ‘my voice isn’t being heard and it has nowhere to go’ ” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/books/review/erica-feldmann-hausmagick.html

The very brief book review by Judith Newman (above) does not explain what Van Eijk means by “my voice isn’t being heard and it has nowhere to go.” Is this “voice” purely metaphorical or is it a voice in her head that Van Eijk hears? In a nonpsychotic person, a voice that is heard, especially if it is recurrent, may be the voice of an alternate personality.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects: As in Gone Girl and Dark Places, the protagonist has multiple personality, but in this novel it is the title issue

The plot of Sharp Objects is about solving several murders—which turn out to have been committed by the protagonist’s mother and half sister—all of which serves to dramatize the protagonist’s traumatic childhood.

The novel’s main issue is indicated by the title, Sharp Objects, which refers, not to the murders, but to the knives and razor blades used by the protagonist, Camille, to cut and scar her skin since childhood. (As readers of this blog know, multiple personality begins in a traumatic childhood).

Camille has a history of being psychiatrically hospitalized for self-cutting. She has a beautiful face, but scars from self-cutting cover her body from the neck down. She is no longer cutting, but her urge to cut continues throughout the novel.

A few brief quotes from a textbook on multiple personality will help you to understand what I will then quote from the novel.

Self-Cutting in Multiple Personality

“Self-mutilation—typically cutting with glass or razor blades, or burning with cigarettes or matches—occurs in at least a third of MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients. The percentage of self-mutilators is probably much higher, because this behavior is often not reported to therapists and is rarely spontaneously discovered except by physical examination” (1, p. 64).

“The sites of self-mutilation in MPD are often hidden from casual examination and commonly include upper arms (hidden by long sleeves), back, inner thighs, breasts, and buttocks. Self-mutilation frequently takes the form of delicate self-cutting with razor blades or fragments of glass” (1, p. 89).

“…persecutor personalities are found in the majority of MPD patients. The persecutor personalities usually direct their acts of hostility toward the host [regular] personality…Suicide is an ever-present issue with multiples. The internal persecutors may be threatening to commit suicide themselves, threatening to kill the host (internal homicide), or urging or commanding the host to kill himself or herself…Self-mutilation by persecutors to punish the host or other alters is common” (1, pp. 205-206).

In this blog, suicide in multiple personality was seen in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Internal homicide was my interpretation of Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen.” Self-cutting has not been discussed in the blog previously.

Camille’s Skin Speaks

Camille has carved specific words into her skin. The words are not experienced by her as being her own thoughts. They just seem to come to her or appear on her skin or are “screamed” at her, and she feels the urge to take sharp objects and cut these words into her skin.

The fact that these are specific words, not just feelings, suggests that they are communications from some sort of thinker. The compulsion to carve them into her skin might indicate that the thinker wants his or her thoughts to be taken seriously and remembered.

Actually, there seems to be more than one thinker behind these words, since the “words” are sometimes described as “squabbling at each other”:

“I am a cutter…My skin, you see, screams. It’s covered with words—cook, cupcake, kitty, curls—as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh…my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked…The problem started long before that…The last word I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body…Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in. I stayed at the hospital twelve weeks. It’s a special place for people who cut, almost all of them women, most under twenty-five. I went when I was thirty” (2, pp. 60-63).

Camille is not psychotic. But how can a person who is not psychotic have the subjective experiences and overt behavior described above? The likely explanation is that she gets these messages from, and is pushed to self-cut by, one or more alternate personalities.

However, if she were a real person coming to me for psychiatric evaluation, I would not make the diagnosis of multiple personality unless and until I actually met and interviewed one or more alternate personalities (without using any drugs or hypnosis).

For example, I might look at the words carved into her skin, choose one, and, since Camille says that she didn’t think up that word, I would ask, “Who said [specific word]?” If she had multiple personality, then in reaction to my question I would see a change in demeanor, the alternate personality involved with that specific word would identify herself, and the alter would be able to provide verifiable information previously unknown to my patient.

Does Gillian Flynn understand Camille?

She would if she had mechanically constructed the character, but most novelists don’t get their characters that way. I would guess that she had read of, or knew, someone who was a cutter; that the idea incubated in her mind; and that one day the character came alive for her. So I think it unlikely that Flynn has any deep psychological understanding of the character.

What about my theory that novelists have a normal version of multiple personality and that they use it to write their novels? Well, I do believe that, but that doesn’t mean most novelists know they have multiple personality or that I know what part it played in the writing of any particular novel.

As I have said in previous posts, apart from my analyses of Gone Girl and Dark Places, the only things I know about Gillian Flynn are that her favorite mystery novelist is Agatha Christie (see my posts on Christie), and that, as a child, one of Flynn’s favorite movies was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which the main character has multiple personality.

1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, Guilford Press, 1989.

2. Gillian Flynn. Sharp Objects. New York, Broadway Paperbacks, 2006.